A chorus of speakers on Tuesday urged Mecklenburg County commissioners to use their limited leverage to ensure Atrium Health delivers on the affordable housing it promised when it won $75M in taxpayer funding for its medical innovation district, The Pearl.
“I want to talk to you about the broken promises at The Pearl, a place with a history of broken promises,” said Angelia James, a west Charlotte resident. “Where is the affordable housing?”
In 2021, when it asked for public money, Atrium said it would set aside 5 percent of housing on site for low-income residents, donate a separate 14-acre site on North Tryon Street to the city’s housing authority and partner with the agency to build more than 400 units there.
But an Oct. 13 Ledger/NC Health News article found that the city’s contract with Atrium does not legally require the hospital to honor all of those commitments. So far, there is no affordable housing on the North Tryon Street site or at The Pearl, which opened last summer and houses the city’s first four-year medical school.
Atrium has stressed that it is meeting its contractual obligations. The hospital system said it is working with a developer to build housing at The Pearl that would include affordable apartments and has placed deed restrictions on the North Tryon land, requiring future development there to include affordable housing.
Tuesday’s speakers — members of the racial justice group the Redress Movement — asked why the North Tryon land was not donated to Inlivian, the city’s housing authority, but instead ended up as part of a three-way land swap that gives Atrium use of the site until 2028. They noted that Atrium received the land from the county for free in 1990.
They also raised concerns about the housing authority’s contract with Atrium, which requires Inlivian to subsidize the affordable units at The Pearl. They said that Atrium, the second-largest landholder in Mecklenburg, already avoids property taxes on most of its land and has more than $1B in reserves.
“Does the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority serve the interests of Charlotte-Mecklenburg or its C-suite executives?” James asked, drawing applause.
The speakers acknowledged that Mecklenburg County has little power over Atrium, which is a separate government entity known as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority. According to state statute, the board’s only power over the authority is that its chair, Mark Jerrell, must approve nominees to the hospital board.
“You have the power to reject Atrium’s nominees to their board. This is the single lever of accountability that is available to us as the public,” said Greg Jarrell, senior campaign organizer for Redress Charlotte.
He urged Jerrell to approve only nominees who have a track record of supporting housing justice; who are committed to the county’s goals of honesty, truth, justice and equity; and who will “hold Atrium executives accountable to those values for serving the public good.”
After the meeting, Jerrell said he already told Atrium leaders he would like at least one of the nominees to “have more of a community focus.”
He also said the county recently received a memo from the hospital that outlined its “hard commitments and soft commitments” related to The Pearl, and that the county would examine it closely. “Do we still have to slice and dice and parse it and get a staff response?” he said. “Yes, that’s the next step.”
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.